Dragonfly Falling

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  They exchanged a look, he and Norsa, that was familiar to both of them, and then he turned to that part of his duty that he felt signified a true officer: to walk amongst the wounded, to acknowledge their whimpers and cries and not to shy away from them. To take ultimate responsibility for the inevitabilities of war.

  In dawn’s unforgiving light, Totho found himself wandering along the line of the ruined wall, trying to find some way in which to account for what he was seeing. The smoke gusting past him was a fickle mercy: for every scene it concealed there were a dozen more clearly visible wherever the eyes turned – the tangible testament to the events of the night.

  The sheer numbers of the dead! The dead were everywhere, all across the city, but mostly here by this stretch of wall and non-wall. To his right were three houses staved in like eggshells by the twisted hulk of a crashed heliopter. The metal of the machine and the stone of the buildings was smoothed off into one tangled whole by the soot, with a single rotor blade jutting proud like a standard above the jagged roof-edges. The ground that he picked his way across was a litter of windfall dead, some savage encounter between the light airborne of the enemy and the defenders’ crossbows. Fallen to the earth like so much rotten fruit, Wasp soldiers and the savage Hornet bolt-fodder lay twisted all over the place, so that he had no clear footing, but stumbled on over broken limbs and the spines of quarrels, spears snapped like matchwood, swordblades sheared from their hilts, and everywhere the vacant, empty faces of once-angry men. Wasp-kinden, certainly, but here in death that stigma was gone from them. They were brothers now with the fallen of the city: all members of that great and inclusive society of the dead.

  Totho paused beside the corpse of a great ant, its wings shattered to shards, its legs curled in on themselves. The crossbow had been shorn from the saddle-mountings, the rider also. Not so far from it lay most of the wing of a Tarkesh orthopter, and for a moment Totho stopped, unable to conceive of any string of events that could leave just the wing, with the bulk of the craft falling elsewhere. He crouched by the great twisted vane, examining where its cables and struts had sheared. Just one more casualty, but it came to him that this wing could serve again, could even be reunited with its original body to fly again, unlike the broken wings of the insect. Thus the artificer became a magician beyond the dreams of the Moth-kinden.

  But in the end it had been those Moth dreams she had preferred.

  And here was where the giants had broken through the wall, the gap they had excavated with their Art and their hands. Their bodies lay, overlapping, where the quick swords of the Ants had found the gaps in their armour. In death, sadness still ruled their faces, not the anger or hatred of the other combatants. The breach they had carved still supported itself, a rough but perfect arch within the wall. Around them the bodies of the defenders and of the Wasp soldiers who had followed after them seemed paltry, like children.

  Now the footing became trickier because here was where the gate had been and gone. The charred corpse of the great ramming engine was still here and Totho looked for, but did not find, the body of the man he had dragged clear – the artificer. It had seemed strange to him, then, that artificers should go to war. Now it was all beginning to make sense.

  Despite their engine, the Wasps had not made it through the gate, though the gap between the strained hinges was choked with their corpses and their enemies’. Besieger and besieged lay over and beside one another in a frozen jumble of black and silver, black and gold, pale skin and the dark stains of dried blood.

  And beyond there, the wall gave out entirely of course. Here was where it had started, and at the broken edge of stone closest to him he could see some of the lower stones squeezed out of shape where the reagent of the Wasps had softened and distorted them. Here was where the defenders’ main force had met the Ants of Maynes, and the slain were piled so high that Totho could not see past them to the field beyond. There was no sense to be made of it, this tangle of arms and legs, shields and swords. It was like one of those clever pictures where a series of shapes interlocks so perfectly that there is no gap between them that does not form another shape, another Ant body. He found himself backing away from the sight but, even as he did, he was thinking, Meat, just meat. The Ant-kinden had been killing each other like this since history cared to record. If the Wasps wanted to join in that pointless bloody round, why should they be dissuaded? The Tarkesh were fighting for their homes now, but how many years would he have to track back before he found them assaulting another city’s gates? Certainly, had Totho been caught outside their walls at any other time, halfbreed and foreigner that he was, he would have been chained as a slave here without hesitation. There could be no special plea for Tark’s virtue.

  Something was moving amongst the dead: he saw children, searching over the bodies of both their own kin and the enemy. He watched them, saw them gathering crossbow quarrels that had not been broken, saw them pulling swords from cold hands, meticulously undoing the buckles of armour. They called out to each other to announce their finds. It shocked him at first, to hear those thin, high voices in this silent place. They were too young, he realized, to have learned the Ancestor Art of the Ants, so they must have been taught these words by their parents, mouth to ear, before they would be able to speak them back mind to mind.

  They were gathering only what was valuable. Not the mere flesh that was spent, not even the purses or effects of the dead. Only the harder metals, that could be used again or smelted and reforged. It seemed to him so fitting, what they did, for they were cogs, and war was the machine. Here on the battlefield was where the machine’s wheels ground hardest, where the metal met and the end process was written in bodies and blood. Had he not seen, in Helleron, where the raw materials of war were cast, all the swords and bolts and engines? Here was where the process came full circle, where the discarded pieces of a war were made as new, ready to go back into the mix. Only the meat, transient and replaceable, would not be saved. There was always more of that. Meanwhile, here came Ant-kinden soldiers to carry the stripped corpses to the pyres, and who knew whether the next ones to fall in this very place would be the same men who now hauled the bodies away? Interchangeable, the living and the dead. All meat.

  He had not intended, when he left the others, to see this. His world had been complete without this. He had been happy in his ignorance, for ignorant Totho had been. But he was an artificer and this war was an artificer’s thing, a mechanical process cranked over and over by the constant refinement of the weaponsmith and the armourer, the automotive engineer and the volatiles chemist. Seen in that light, in that harsh but clear light, the whole business became somehow admirable. If he looked past the meat, contrived not to see it, then it was just another process that sharpened and honed itself each time it was set in motion.

  ‘Hey, Beetle-boy!’

  He looked up without curiosity to see Skrill picking her way over to him, with Salma following a little way behind. Her arm was bandaged tightly, bound up in a sling. ‘I ain’t pulling any bow no time soon,’ she informed him. ‘Got me good, they did. Thought they’d got you too, when you took off.’

  Totho merely shook his head. It seemed so long since he had spoken that the words had dried up inside him, making him envy the Ant-kinden and their voices of the mind.

  ‘Well, if this ain’t a right mess,’ Skrill decided, dismissing the butchery with that. The air was thickening with flies, an intrusion Totho had not noticed before, from the littlest ones to fist-sized blood-drinkers. Where do they come from? Was there some machine churning them out? Surely all these insects had not been just waiting around in Tark for a massacre.

  ‘The Ants think they won, last night,’ Salma said, ‘though I’m not so sure. The Wasps eventually pulled back, but to their own tune, not ours.’ He used to smile a lot, Totho remembered, but his face was tired now, without even the ghost of that grin left.

  ‘They’re all over the gaps in the wall, our lot, putting up stuff to fill ’em,’ Skril
l added. ‘Ain’t going to make much difference is my thinking.’

  ‘Parops reckons they can hold against one more attack before the Wasps take the wall, anyway,’ Salma continued. ‘Their soldiers got the measure of the Wasp infantry last night, and the Tarkesh think they’re superior. If the Wasps want the wall they’ll have to pay for it, or that’s what they’re saying.’

  Totho surprised himself by laughing. Salma stared at him.

  ‘What? Is something funny?’

  ‘You,’ said Totho, feeling his voice rasp in his throat. ‘You, fighting an Ant war. Where’s Parops?’

  Wordlessly, Salma pointed to where a squad of Ants was labouring at one edge of the breach, fixing stone and wood into place to make some kind of a barricade.

  ‘Let’s talk to Parops,’ said Totho, but Salma gripped him by the shoulder.

  ‘Are you hurt, Toth?’

  The halfbreed artificer looked him right in the eye, but without quite focusing. ‘I’ve just . . . seen . . . Salma, I made a mistake. You know why I came?’

  ‘I think I do.’

  ‘How could . . . ? Surely this isn’t what I meant, by coming here.’

  Salma let out a long breath. ‘I don’t think anybody meant this. I never saw it, but I heard reports during the Twelve-Year War. There were single days of fighting that you could have fitted these corpses into five times. And if Tark falls, then where next? Helleron? Collegium? This is why we have to fight them.’

  Totho shook his head, feeling it throb in response. ‘If we wanted to stop this, then we should just not fight them at all. We should just give in. But we don’t, and so we don’t want to stop it. We fight them to create war, and this’ – a vague gesture across the strewn ground – ‘is just a byproduct. War is what it’s about, and we all work hard at it.’

  ‘Listen to you, Beetle-boy,’ Skrill said nervously. ‘You got knocked on the head or something?’

  ‘There may have been a grenade,’ Totho said vaguely. ‘Close, perhaps. We should speak to Parops.’ Without a further look at them he wandered away.

  Parops glanced up as they came over. Helping build barricades, he still had his armour on and it was still unfastened at the back. In all the night’s chaos there had been nobody yet to secure it for him. Nero was sitting nearby, watching the busy activity but pointedly taking no part in it.

  ‘You’re wasting your time, Commander,’ Totho announced for all to hear. Parops raised an eyebrow.

  ‘And why’s that?’ he asked. Salma came up quickly and took Totho’s arm.

  ‘He’s taken a beating,’ he explained. ‘You shouldn’t mind him.’

  ‘They won’t come in by this door. They wanted to draw you out. I’ve understood it,’ Totho explained.

  ‘Since when were you a tactician, lad?’ Nero asked him.

  ‘I don’t have to be. There was a man . . . a slave of the Wasps. He told me. He warned me, I think. “Airships,” he said. I would use airships, if I could.’

  Staring at Totho, Parops had gone very still. ‘Airships,’ he echoed.

  Totho shrugged, still finding it difficult to concentrate. None of it seemed that important. ‘That was what he said. I think it was what he said.’

  ‘Totho!’ Salma took him by the shoulders and pulled at him. ‘Come back to us,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying, but if it’s important . . .’

  The world shifted and slid sideways in Totho’s head, and he blinked. ‘He said airships,’ he told Salma softly. ‘I pulled him out from under the engine. He was an artificer, Salma, like me.’

  ‘You’d better come with me,’ said Parops, and set off for his guard tower at a jog.

  He took them up to his arrowslit, noticeably slanted now. Parops’s entire tower seemed to be at a slight tilt. His commandership there might be living on borrowed time, Salma reckoned.

  Out beyond the wall they could see the broad swathe of the imperial camp, and there was little new there, save that their numbers seemed barely touched by the atrocities of the previous night.

  At the camp’s far end, though, lay the enemy’s makeshift airfield, where a few of the heliopters could be made out. There, beyond those blocky, graceless things, something was now rising up.

  Several things, in fact. Half a dozen bloated shapes were slowly, imperceptibly swelling. Already they were bigger than the heliopters ranged before them, and Salma had the impression they still had a way to expand yet.

  Parops had passed round his telescope, which Salma had no idea what to do with. It showed him nothing but blurs but Totho took it and peered into it keenly, seeming more focused than he had been since Skrill had first found him.

  ‘They would do the job,’ the artificer observed. ‘I can see that. Now there are no air defences left.’

  ‘Little enough,’ Parops agreed. ‘Most of the nest crop is gone, and we only have a couple of orthopters that could even be repaired on time. They threw a lot at us last night.’

  ‘Of course, and for that very reason,’ Totho murmured, still scrutinizing the distant gasbags. ‘An artificer’s war.’ He looked back at the others, seeming more himself, more the avid student Salma had known. The animation with which he spoke of his trade was macabre. ‘Airships are very vulnerable to any flying attack. That’s why they’ve not been used much in warfare.’ Right now he might have been a College master delivering his lecture.

  ‘So what are those things out there?’ Skrill demanded. Totho gave her a frustrated look.

  ‘They’re airships, of course, because there will be no airborne opposition to them now. They just have to float them over the city. It makes perfect sense. It’s just that the Tarkesh don’t think like Wasps. Parops, your people fight ground wars, and so your air power is secondary, kept just for spotting and the occasional surprise attack, but the Wasps think like you should think, Salma. They think in the air and now they’ve opened the city on the ground, and stripped its wings away, they’ll proceed to attack it from above. Those heliopters are too heavy, and they fly too low. You could shoot them down with your wall artillery, maybe even with sufficient crossbows. The airships, though . . . they can go so high, only the best fliers could reach them. So what will you do?’

  ‘But what can they do?’ Nero asked. ‘They can spy us out, but we can shoot their troops if they drop down—’

  ‘They can do whatever they want,’ Totho said, leaning back against the wall, his mind still full of airships. ‘The whole of Tark will be spread below them. Explosives, incendiaries – it would be like dropping boiling oil onto a map, you see. Drop – drop – drop, and three buildings gone. And all we will be able to do is shake our fists at them.’

  Twelve

  Che had never before seen an Ant-kinden who was actually fat. If it were not for Plius’s distinctive Ant features she would have thought him some kind of halfbreed. That was not the only surprise about him. He was not a Sarnesh Ant, which was even more remarkable given the Ants’ propensity to make war on others of their own kind. His skin was icy blue-white while the irises of his eyes were dead black, which had the effect of making them seem huge. She had seldom seen such colouring before, and had no idea what city-state he might have come from.

  ‘Scuto,’ he called out from the table he had to himself in the taverna, leaning back in a capacious chair. He wore an open robe over an expensive-looking tunic that strained over his belly, but there was a shortsword slung over the chair-back, to show he had not entirely left his belligerent roots behind.

  Scuto glanced about, but none of the other patrons, few enough of them, seemed interested. It was still before midday and most of the inhabitants of Sarn’s foreign quarter were out taking care of business.

  ‘It’s been a while,’ Plius remarked, as the Thorn Bug approached. He kicked another chair out for him, and then glanced quickly from Che’s face to Sperra’s. ‘Pimping now, are you?’ he asked. Despite his louche appearance, he spoke in an Ant’s voice, with its characteristic clipped precision.
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  ‘This lady here is Cheerwell Maker. You remember Sten Maker? Well this is his niece. The other’s called Sperra.’

  Plius waved the introductions away. ‘So I heard you were looking for me, Scuto. It’s been a while,’ he repeated.

  ‘It has that,’ Scuto admitted. ‘Didn’t know how much of the old cadre would still be here for me.’

  Plius shrugged. ‘There’s Dola over at the Chop Ketcher Importing place but, if you’ve not heard from her, she’s probably keeping her head down. As I said, Scuto, it’s been a while since then, and we’ve all had the chance to make some money here in Sarn.’

  Scuto’s pause for breath, his moment of hesitation, opened a book for Che on his relations with Plius: revealing that they had never really trusted one another, and that Scuto had no guarantee that the other man would be of any use to them.

  ‘So where are we now?’ Scuto asked.

  Plius shrugged. ‘We’re in a city where I have a good business going, Scuto, but if you want something, then ask and, if it’s not too much out of my way, maybe it will happen.’

  ‘What is your business, if I can ask?’ Che put in. This man seemed so corrupt, but she knew the Ants were ruthless with crime, even here in Sarn.

  ‘Ah, well.’ Plius coughed and grinned. ‘It happens I’m the most successful milliner in Sarn.’